May I request a drive to work about the difference between designing when a theme is for an entire set (eg. magecraft in Strixhaven) vs when it's a limited archetype (eg. instants and sorceries in Izzet)?

I can add it to the “short” list.

Did you guys consider having 1 or 2 cards per plane with abilities that plane is known for? Like a mutate creature, and a creature with magecraft, etc?

That is something we do in Modern Horizons sets, but not premier sets.

Hey Mark! Hope you're well. I'm a recent fan of Magic with Strixhaven being the set that got me "all in". My question in turn involves Magecraft. What is the reason for always following the keyword with the "whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell" qualifier? Can Magecraft potentially care about other spell types being cast/copied?

Magecraft is what’s known as an ability word. It’s italicized text that puts a name to what the rules text is telling you. That’s why the text always appears after it. Ability words have more flexibility than keywords, because keywords have to represent the exact same rules text card to card, where ability words do not (they have a little more wiggle room). That said, I don;t see us doing Magecraft and caring about different spell types. Those are different keywords/ability words.

Bday was 2 days ago so a bit late, but maybe you could offer some trivia on Prowess and/or Magecraft.

Magecraft’s design name was spellcast. Caring about copying was part of its design from the beginning. Happy Belated Birthday!

Since we have landfall, constellation and magecraft, is there any chance to see artifact or creature version of these effect one day?

There is.a chance.

How difficult was getting War of the Spark out in a balanced state, and does the difficulties encountered make a "planeswalkers matter" set little more than a wish? I don't really feel War was that type since it did not really have an Affinity, Constellation, Magecraft, etc style mechanic; it had cards that cared about specific Planeswalkers like the Triumphs, but did not really seem to care about Planeswalkers in general like other cardtype-focused sets.

Planeswalkers definitely mattered. For example, proliferate was in the set particularly to help you get more loyalty on your planeswalkers. But the as-fan of planeswalkers kept us from doing a more traditional “blah matters” theme like we do with other card types. For example, something like planeswalkerfall would have been uneventful in most decks.

Hello Mark, one Question. Did you and your team considered for Strixhaven The adventure mechanic. It would have been renamed into Like class, where the creature is the teacher and the spell would have been the spell that he is teaching. It would also solved the problem for the set to have enough spells for Magecraft and still enough creatures.

We talked about adventures. Throne of Eldraine still being in Standard had us look at other options.

Hey Mark, I am pretty disappointed at first glance in Strixhaven, which is a shame as I was highly anticipating this set. Maybe how mystical archive works is the magic sauce needed to make it click together. Maybe the spell copying is more frequent / better then I expect, but I currently dislike the design. I am definitely going to give it a try with an open mind though.I feel its very much not an instant and sorcery matters set really, and is very much a token set. I get that was done to increase the ASFAN of instant and sorceries, by making some creatures into spells, but mentally I still count them as creatures as that's what they actually are. As a Johnny/Spike most of what I am interested in the set has been concentrated in these spells, and they are essentially french vanilla creatures. And it feels like we are missing a lot of spells I would have expected to make these tokens good. For one very specific example, I would have expected a counterspell at least as good as Cancel at common.In addition the magecraft triggers are so highly creature focused, which means I naturally want to play fewer combat tricks and rely on magecraft to do that job. Instead the set feels like it's giving me more combat tricks to make tokens better, so I just double up and magecraft becomes boring, as it feels a lot like I am just playing with landfall again.Is there something I am missing?

The key to making any theme work is creating the structure that can let it shine. Maybe in concept a set that’s just nothing but instants and sorceries, none of which make creature tokens, sounds intriguing, but it lacks the things you need to make an environment dynamic. Strixhaven is structured to make instants and sorceries matter in ways they don’t normally get to, and while landfall for spells might sound like just a tweak of landfall, it’s not. All I can recommend at this point is to play the set. You seem to dislike things theoretically, but they exist that way for good reason, even if you don’t understand why yet. After you play write back and we can talk.

Were there any concerns about how similar the words Magecraft and Metalcraft are?

No. Mage and metal are two different words.

Magecraft has some similarities with Storm, was there concern making a full mechanic out of this effect, we do see similar variants of this a lot, stretched out to all the colors might be a bit too much for some archtypes/Strategies?

I worked with Storm. I designed cards with Storm. Storm was a friend of mine. Magecraft, you’re no Storm. : )